ABOUT THIS BOOK
In the final years of the twentieth century, émigrés from engineering and computer science devoted themselves to biology and resolved that if the aim of biology is to understand life, then making life would yield better theories than experimentation. Armed with the latest biotechnology techniques, these scientists treated biological media as elements for design and manufacture: viruses named for computers, bacterial genomes encoding passages from James Joyce, chimeric yeast buckling under the metabolic strain of genes harvested from wormwood, petunias, and microbes from Icelandic thermal pools.
In Synthetic: How Life Got Made, cultural anthropologist Sophia Roosth reveals how synthetic biologists make new living things in order to understand better how life works. The first book-length ethnographic study of this discipline, Synthetic documents the social, cultural, rhetorical, economic, and imaginative transformations biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Roosth traces this new science from its origins at MIT to start-ups, laboratories, conferences, and hackers’ garages across the United States—even to contemporary efforts to resurrect extinct species. Her careful research reveals that rather than opening up a limitless new field, these biologists’ own experimental tactics circularly determine the biological features, theories, and limits they fasten upon. Exploring the life sciences emblematic of our time, Synthetic tells the origin story of the astonishing claim that biological making fosters biological knowing.
REVIEWS
“Synthetic is essential reading for anyone wanting to know what’s been going on in the exciting and disturbing world of synthetic biology. But it’s much more than that. It addresses the current state of a long-standing cultural argument about the conditions in which you can know the world. Does the artificial belong to a different order from the natural, or, as synthetic biologists now maintain, can you only know what you can make? The result is both brilliant anthropology and vivid reporting from the research front.”
— Steven Shapin, author of The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation
“This is stimulating, entertaining, and engrossing reading, which combines ethnographic richness with sophisticated theoretical reflection. Every chapter of Roosth’s book will challenge you to think about the topic of synthetic biology in new and refreshing ways.”
— Jane Calvert, author of Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature
“In Synthetic, talented science historian Roosth describes her observations of the field's early evolution. . . . Roosth's approach sparks deep questions about the nature of life.”
— Nature
"Synthetic offers a writerly assemblage of our synthetic moment, where densely evocative analytical contributions and cognitive fireworks are juxtaposed with intimate confessions, all in the poetry of contemporary ethnography."
— Science
“[A] close-up, wide-angle study of synthetic biologists that tries to understand their perspective on both life and the act of creating it… Roosth is after the meaning of life in synthetic biology.”
— Daniel Liu, Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences
"For all the rigour that goes into their making, science and technology are still things that human beings do, and as Roosth reminds us, humans are messy. We have opinions, passions and biases; we argue, we learn, we fall in and out of love. As a synthetic biologist, I’ve seen first-hand what may yet prove to be foundational debates about how life works and how it should work. I’ve also learned from anthropologists and historians like Roosth that to do good work, we can’t ignore our humanity or wipe away our history. Instead, we must work to more deeply understand the very human practice of science. Reading books like this one will help."
— New Scientist
“Synthetic examines the multiple manifestations of the emerging field of synthetic biology, whose practitioners engineer, study, and utilize genetically modified organisms. Roosth views the field through an anthropological lens as she interviews leading synthetic biologists, investigates how they are trained, and probes the shifting definitions of a very young discipline. Roosth examines the corporate cultures of two radically different companies engaged in commercial synthetic biology. Other chapters cover do-it-yourself synthetic biology “biohackers,” labor relations in industrial synthetic biology, and the promise of reviving extinct organisms. The book repeatedly returns to modern and archaic definitions of the word synthetic as a unifying theme. This trope is interesting, but its relevance to the practice of synthetic biology is tenuous; most practitioners do not know the definitions discussed. Roosth is best when describing the people who engineer organisms. Her writing is clean and lively, and she avoids overanalysis…. Synthetic offers an excellent window on one of biology’s newest, most provocative disciplines. Recommended.”
— Choice
"[A] fascinating and clear look at an emerging scientific discipline and the way the main actors understand it.”
— Frankfurter Allgemeine
"The whole book, though ambitious, reads extremely well. . . . Synthetic both provides a stimulating and entertaining read. It should be of interest to anyone curious about the latest developments in contemporary biology."
— History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Analysis: Synthesis - Sophia Roosth
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0001
[analysis;synthesis;postgenomic era;manufacture;theory]
“Analysis: Synthesis” first surveys the current landscape of American synthetic biology: its research centers, funding sources, commercial applications, and notable projects. The chapter traces the historical precursors of synthetic biology in the life sciences from the early nineteenth century to now, and differentiates synthetic biology’s project from earlier efforts to make or manipulate organisms in laboratories, whether in the service of experimental biology or biotechnology. The chapter argues that in the wake of the Human Genome Project, twenty-fist century molecular biology is no longer guided by an overarching theory, whether hypothetical, experimental, or otherwise. Molecular biology, bioinformatics, and genomics now swim in a torrent more noise than signal: genomes sequenced, protein structures uploaded, and most of the rest databased, tabulated, and released online. The turning point presaged by what some call “the postgenomic era” has practical consequences, not just for which living things now occupy our world but also for how some biologists understand what “life itself” is. Synthetic biologists responded to this state of affairs by claiming that if all the data collected, collated, coaxed, and tended by experimental inquiry are not enough, then biological manufacture will serve as life’s new “theory machine.” (pages 1 - 15)
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
1. Life by Design: Evolution and Creation Tales in Synthetic Biology
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0002
[intelligent design;creation;design;Massachusetts Institute of Technology;Drew Endy;MIT]
Chapter 1, “Life by Design,” tracks early experimental efforts to model and engineer genetically simplified T7 viruses in the laboratory of Drew Endy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 2000s. Judeo-Christian tropes of creation shape synthetic biologists’ descriptions of this work. By identifying themselves as both agents able to “evolve” life and as animals subject to evolution, synthetic biologists imagine themselves in epistemologically ambiguous territory when they design living systems. Weaving evolutionary tales with biblical ones, they cast themselves as figures simultaneously unnatural, natural, and supernatural. The chapter places this account within the context of arguments over creation and intelligent design that were then prominent in American political discourse, and uses those debates to clarify how synthetic biologists were thinking about what it means to, as they put it, “intelligently design” life.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
2. The Synthetic Kingdom: Transgenic Kinship in the Postgenomic Era
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0003
[taxonomy;kinship;postnatural;Jay Keasling;queer;transgenic organisms]
Chapter 2, “The Synthetic Kingdom,” examines Bay Area synthetic biologists building organisms that manufacture fuels and drugs, such as Jay Keasling, whose goal was to manufacture cheap antimalarial drugs in bacterial hosts. This chapter appraises how these researchers think about the microbes they made: E. coli and yeast, brewing in flasks, containing genes from disparate kingdoms and domains of life. Joining the history of biological taxonomy to anthropological theories of queer or “voluntary” kinship demonstrates that such organisms inaugurate new forms of relatedness, which synthetic biologists treat as both putatively “natural” and phylogenetically ambiguous. Such "postnatural" organisms do not fit neatly into trees of life based on descent, ancestry, or lineage. Some scientists and artists even debate whether they are building a new branch of the tree of life, “Kingdom Synthetica.” Their efforts undermine any notion of biological relatedness as fixed or natural. It may seem counterintuitive to use queer kinship theory to describe bioengineered organisms. This chapter nonetheless contends that, just as queer kinship problematizes Euro-American faiths in blood-based nuclear relatedness, engineered life-forms behave queerly, undermining theories of descent and lineage even in those organisms that have not been transgenically tampered with.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
3. The Rebirth of the Author: New Life in Legal and Economic Circuits
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0004
[intellectual property;copyleft;Open Source]
Chapter 3, “The Rebirth of the Author,” turns to how novel bioengineered organisms mirror synthetic biologists’ arguments about how such creatures should be exchanged. It shows that ideas about genetic exchanges within biotic systems underwrite the ways biologists think about economic exchange, in particular how analogies of life to either text or machines shape the way synthetic biologists think about and act upon intellectual property decisions ranging from patenting, copyright, Open Source, and copyleft to credit, attribution, and publishing. Not only shaping epistemological definitions (of what life is) or normative claims (about what it should be), these analogies impact the way bioengineering gets done and the legal and economic regimes that are installed in and around it.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
4. Biotechnical Agnosticism: Fragmented Life and Labor among the Machines
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0005
[Taylorism;Toyota Way;decoupling;design;manufacture;agnosticism;automation;labor]
Chapter 4, “Biotechnical Agnosticism,” enters the lab of a Boston start-up company that built what members term a biological “assembly line” following the principles of Taylorism, the late-nineteenth-century management theory that tried to maximize labor efficiency. This company is compared to a larger, for-profit synthetic biology company in the Bay Area, in which the corporate ethos is also suffused by management theories emphasizing efficiency. Both companies subscribe to the “Toyota Way” production cycle forged in Japanese factories and popularized in American manufacturing philosophies such as General Electric’s “Six Sigma.” This chapter observes the deskilling of PhD benchwork in favor of undergraduate labor in one company and short-term manual laborers operating robots in the other. Juxtaposing these two companies shows how engineers have imported not only technical principles of manufacture (such as standardization, decoupling, and abstraction) into biology but also the labor relations and forms of alienation that underwrite mass production in late capitalism. As a result, synthetic biological work is fragmented, divided between the high-prestige work of biological design and the automation of biological manufacture. In some cases biological design is evacuated from industrial synthetic biology, which instead is feverishly spurred on by ever-increasing speeds and scales of production.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
5. Life Makes Itself at Home: The Rise of Biohacking as Political Action
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0006
[biohacking;amateurs;biotech hobbyists;democracy]
Chapter 5, "Life Makes Itself at Home," turns to new locales in which nonbiologists capitalize on the notion that biological engineering is becoming a “deskilled” task by choosing to conduct bioengineering in nonacademic locales. The chapter observes how amateurs and biotech hobbyists use the same genetic parts developed by synthetic biologists to engineer living systems outside professional laboratories: in kitchens, garages, and community hobby workshops. In occupying ambiguous territory between experimentation and manufacture, synthetic biology has allowed bioengineering to leave the laboratory. Today dilettantes dabble in synthetic biology in order to argue against the large-scale, deskilled, and highly proprietary status of industrial synthetic biology (and “Big Biology” and biotechnology more broadly). Doing biological work at home, these biohackers subvert and critique this state of affairs, demonstrating that bioengineering may be a domestic enterprise.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
6. Latter-Day Lazarus: Biological Salvage and Species Revival
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0007
[species;de-extinction;resurrection;salvage;temporality;woolly mammoth]
Chapter 6, “Latter-Day Lazarus,” recounts a resurrection tale, one in which synthetic biologists propose engineering a bio-Eden out of a biological wasteland. Synthetic biologists and conservation biologists are jointly working to “revive” extinct species such as the woolly mammoth and the passenger pigeon. Reporting on their efforts at de-extinction, this chapter attends to narratives of biologically enabled historical salvage, returning to the theme of transspecies and interspecies exchange, asking how synthetic biology problematizes definitions of species purity and biological temporality. By bookending “life” as an epistemic category, synthetic biologists remake biology as not just physical living stuff but also an engineered demonstration of what living things might once have been and what engineered organisms might someday become.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
Conclusion
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226440637.003.0008
[knowing;making;life itself;interested making]
Biological knowing and biological making, paired under the twin signs of the factual and the artifactual, have been mutually constitutive for some time, but that fact is now manifestly evident in the way life scientists think, talk, and work. This chapter concludes that as “life itself” deliquesces and recrystallizes, reforms and deforms, in the hands of contemporary synthetic biologists, the relations between making and knowing are also radically reconfigured. The approach to making and knowing life that was inaugurated by synthetic biology inhabits a different sort of epistemic space than other methods typical of the life sciences. Namely, it is "interested making," making with a question attached. The objects of that making incarnate and exemplify answers, even as they point toward as-yet-unasked questions. Such objects of synthetic biology function synecdochically as vital manifestations of theories that convince and compel synthetic biologists to redefine “life itself” as a much broader, yet nonetheless malleable, entity. Synthetic demonstrates that theories of the biological underwrite theories of the social. Finally, this chapter claims that the story Synthetic tells is not limited to biology but is instead endemic to the contemporary sciences.
This chapter is available at:
https://academic.oup.com/chica...
